The present invention concerns a high speed data transfer over twisted pair cabling.
Generally, for high speed data transfer in a local area network (LAN) where data transfer rates are in excess of 25 MHz, data has been transferred using a fiber optic media. For example, the fiber distributed data interface (FDDI) protocol is a common network protocol which operates using a fiber optic medium.
The use of fiber optic media for local area networking presents various problems. Particularly, most existing buildings do not have an installed base of fiber optic cable. Therefore, to utilize a fiber optic network it is generally required to specially install fiber optic cabling. This can be cost prohibitive.
There has been some work done to increase the rate over which data can be transferred over installed twisted pair cabling. Twisted pair cabling is used for voice grade telephone transmissions. See for example U.S. Pat. No. 5,119,402 issued to Simon A. Ginzburg et al. for a Method and Apparatus for Transmission of Local Area Network Signals over Unshielded Twisted Pairs. However, in the prior art there has been no work which has sufficiently increased the speed of data transmission so that transmission over a four pair voice grade twisted wire pair network can rival the speed of data transmissions over fiber optic cabling.